Month: March 2024

  Consider yourself warned. Talking to a writer is risky business.   We should come with a hazard sticker; “Be Advised! Anything you say may be used in my work.”   Simply put, there are only three sources for what a writer puts down on paper. First is imagination, which,…

Ancient Roman mosaic, buckled by earthquake, https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/discovering-roman-mosaics/   During the battle of Waterloo, Wellington, the British commander, is reported to have said to his staff, “I saw this ground last year, and kept it in my back pocket since.” (https://gjscloset.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/meet-your-waterloo/) Meaning that his keen military mind had made note of…

  For an upcoming novel, the narrative demanded that a character be flung off of an asteroid, and spend about 30 minutes falling back to the surface, because of the lower gravity involved. As originally written, the chapter is set on the asteroid Ceres. However, a little voice in the…

  Did Rudyard Kipling invent steam punk? Arguably, yes.   The other day, an online post took me back to my high school days, when I stayed up through one Saturday night to finish an anthology of Kipling stories. That must have been an earlier collection than the one edited…

Here’s a snippet from the first chapter of my stand alone novel, Fool’s Paradise. It’s the tale of an interstellar freelance operative, who is hired to retrieve something of value from a planet which has descended into chaos. Before long, he figures out the job is going to be a…

Image: The Wizard of ID, The Peasants Are Revolting   I have a serious problem, with revolting characters.   Upon starting to write fiction, I discovered that there are several different ways to plan out a story. The most logical is just that. Write down an outline of how the…